Toyota duly collected another clean sweep of World Endurance Championship titles – drivers’ and manufacturers’ – as well the piece of silverware that mattered: the one on offer at the Le Mans 24 Hours. Yet unlike last year in season one of the Le Mans Hypercar rules, it was made to sing for its supper, though more in terms of the mathematics of the points table than the action out on the race track. Alpine went into the curtain-closer in Bahrain equal on points with the Japanese marque in the drivers’ championship.
The French manufacturer may have had the points on the board ahead of the Bahrain 8 Hours last month, but it didn’t have the performance to mount a challenge when the WEC circus arrived in the Middle East. Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa duly sealed the title with a safe second aboard the #8 Toyota GR010 HYBRID behind the sister car of Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Jose Maria Lopez. The Alpine-Gibson A480 shared by Nicolas Lapierre, Matthieu Vaxiviere and Andre Negrao trailed home third to no great surprise.
The Balance of Performance hit that Alpine had taken ahead of the previous round at Fuji in September had only been partially reversed after Lapierre and his team-mates had finished the same margin down on the Toyotas. A couple of tweaks – a tad more power for the A480, a bit less for the GR010 – still left it lingering some way back on performance.
Yet there were occasions when Alpine’s old ORECA LMP1 design, which formerly raced as the Rebellion R-13, was in the mix, or was even the cream on top. Nowhere was that more the case than at the Sebring 1000 Miles season-opener in March. Vaxiviere put the car on pole by a whopping 1.3s and, quite frankly, the ageing machine developed out of the ORECA 07 LMP2 design was in a different
